Mono ( ) is a Native American language of the

Numic Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, Snake River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic com ...

group of

Uto-Aztecan languages Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

, the ancestral language of the

Mono people The Mono ( ) are a Native American people who traditionally live in the central Sierra Nevada, the Eastern Sierra (generally south of Bridgeport), the Mono Basin, and adjacent areas of the Great Basin. The Eastern mono is often grouped under th ...

. Mono consists of two dialects, ''Eastern'' and ''Western''. The name "Monachi" is commonly used in reference to Western Mono and "Owens Valley Paiute" in reference to Eastern Mono. In 1925,

Alfred Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first ...

estimated that Mono had 3,000 to 4,000 speakers. only about 40 elderly people spoke Mono as their first language. It is classified as critically endangered by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

. It is spoken in the southern

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada () is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primarily ...

, the

Mono Basin The Mono Basin is an endorheic drainage basin located east of Yosemite National Park in California and Nevada. It is bordered to the west by the Sierra Nevada, to the east by the Cowtrack Mountains, to the north by the Bodie Hills, and to the sou ...

, and the

Owens Valley Owens Valley (Numic Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, Snake River basin, and southern Great Pl ...

of central-eastern

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. Mono is most closely related to

Northern Paiute Northern may refer to the following: Geography * North, a point in direction * Northern Europe, the northern part or region of Europe * Northern Highland, a region of Wisconsin, United States * Northern Province, Sri Lanka * Northern Range, a r ...

; these two are classified as the Western group of the

branch of the

Uto-Aztecan language family Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

."Mono."
''Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.'' 2009-2010 (retrieved 6 May 2010)

Western Mono

The number of Native speakers in 1994 ranged from 37 to 41. The majority of speakers are from the Northfork Rancheria and the community of Auberry. The

Big Sandy Rancheria The Big Sandy Rancheria of Mono Indians of California is a ranchería and federally recognized tribe of Western Mono Indians (Monache) located in Fresno County, California, United States.Dunlap have from 12 to 14 speakers. The Northfork Mono are developing a dictionary, and both they and the Big Sandy Rancheria provide language classes. While not all are completely fluent, about 100 members of Northfork have "some command of the language."Hinton, 31 In the late 1950s, Lamb compiled a dictionary and grammar of Northfork Mono. The Western Mono language has a number of Spanish loanwords dating to the period of Spanish colonization of

the Californias The Californias (Spanish: ''Las Californias''), occasionally known as The Three Californias or Two Californias, are a region of North America spanning the United States and Mexico, consisting of the U.S. state of California and the Mexican stat ...

, as well as loanwords from

Yokuts The Yokuts (previously known as MariposasPowell, 1891:90–91.) are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages. ''Yokuts ...

and

Miwok The Miwok (also spelled Miwuk, Mi-Wuk, or Me-Wuk) are members of four linguistically related Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok languages in the Utian family. The word ' ...

Owens Valley Paiute

In the mid-1990s, an estimated 50 people spoke the Owens Valley Paiute language, also known as Eastern Mono. Informal language classes exist and singers keep native language songs alive. Linguist

Sydney Lamb Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar. He has speciali ...

studied this language in the 1950s and proposed the name Paviotso, but that was not widely adopted. The Handbook of Indians of California, by A. L. Kroeber (1919) says that the Owens Valley Paiutes Are Northern Paiute or Mono/Bannock.

Phonemes

Below is given the phoneme inventory of Northfork Western Mono as presented by Lamb (1958).

Vowels

Consonants

Suprasegmental

Lamb (1958) also described four

suprasegmental In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, str ...

features that he ascribed phonemic status.

Morphology

Mono is an

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative langu ...

language, in which words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

s strung together.

References

Sources

*Hinton, Leanne. ''Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages.'' Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1994. . *Miller, Wick R. "Numic Languages." ''Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin, Volume 11.'' Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1986. . *

External links

*
Mono language
overview at the

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (originally the Survey of California Indian Languages) at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas. The survey also hosts ...

*
OLAC resources in and about the Mono language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mono language Mono tribe Agglutinative languages Numic languages Indigenous languages of California Indigenous languages of the North American Great Basin Endangered Uto-Aztecan languages Native American language revitalization